ASPS President Rob Hay on the urgent policing issues he hopes the new Justice Minister will address
I would like to congratulate the new Cabinet Secretary for Justice in Scotland, Neil Gray, as he takes up his post.
One of the key things I would like to see is that the Minister thinks about not just what’s needed in Scottish policing, but also what’s not needed. And that’s the creation of yet more offences, without appropriate levels of policing support and resources.
Take, for example, the policing of major sporting events – we have sufficient legislative powers to deal with these events, but we need sufficient resources. I would like the Scottish Government to have the courage to look at non-policing solutions to some of the challenges we face at football matches.
Overall, this Government needs to have a coherent vision for policing. What sorts of public services does it want in Scotland – what should the provision for police stations in cities, towns and villages look like?
Since Police Scotland came into being, it has only disposed of assets and closed police offices; very rarely has it opened new police offices. While it may be possible for policing to be delivered with a smaller physical footprint, is that what the public wants or expects? Every time we close a police office, we have significant objections from the local community. And a lot of the time, the reason we’re closing police offices is because they’ve fallen into disrepair, and that’s happened because of a lack of capital investment.
We know that to deliver an equitable level of service over a large, dispersed geography is more expensive. Police Scotland polices the largest part of the UK’s landmass, so you would expect our capital budget to be proportionately higher than other forces in the UK. But Police Scotland report we are around the fourth lowest per capita, and that just doesn’t stack up.
The new Justice Minister also needs to take a view on police numbers in Scotland. We’re currently at pre-2006 numbers, while we’re experiencing whole new types of demand – and, of course, the conventional types of demand haven’t gone away either. Officers are so thin on the ground that it’s becoming a real risk for police officers as well as for communities. If you look at the level of sickness absence and cancelled rest days, these problems are symptoms of a broader issue, which is an insufficient level of resources to deliver the job that we are being asked to do.
The HMICS has just published a report on the conditions at the St Leonards custody suite in Edinburgh. The report flags systemic challenges with resourcing and the quality of the custody areas, and that comes back to a lack of capital investment. Cells are being closed all over Scotland, and officers have to travel far further with prisoners. That can lead to officers making different operational decisions, as they are less incentivised to make arrests.
This speaks to a wider challenge in the criminal justice system and the lack of prison places. We have been releasing 100 prisoners early every month, which is then an issue for policing to deal with in communities. I’m tired of hearing about how we need to make prisons a safer environment. Our job as police officers is to make communities a safer environment. Successive Scottish governments have been unwilling to do something, but I think it is clear we do not have enough prison places.
Policing has to be higher on the Government’s agenda. Since the creation of Police Scotland, at times there’s been a mentality of: ‘job done’. But that doesn’t reflect reality. It took 10 years to get a stable ICT platform. Our current divisions look very much the same as the boundaries of legacy forces. There is a whole new phase of reform that our Chief Constable has spoken about that needs to be supported by the Government if we’re to achieve sustainability and a good level of service for the public. At times over the past 10 years, it has felt more like the managed decline of policing in Scotland.
I’m looking forward to a really productive relationship with the new Justice Secretary, and hope he will be able to come to our ASPS Annual Conference next month]. We will be really supportive of any agenda he has that is connected to protecting the public and making Scotland a safer place.